Review of Pornography: Structures, Agency, and Performance by Rebecca Sullivan & Alan McKee, Polity Press 2015. (PB/HB). 219pp. REVIEW BY MARTIN FRADLEY, University of Brighton Has contemporary pornography lost its transgressive status, or does it remain the locus of conservative moral panic? A handful of media events as I was reading this book would suggest … Continue reading BOOK REVIEW – Pornography: Structures, Agency, and Performance
Tag: pornography
CFP: Rethinking Gender and Agency in Pornography
Call for articles:
A special issue of AG About Gender: International Journal of Gender Studies will be dedicated to the topic of Rethinking Gender and Agency in Pornography: Producers, Consumers, Workers and Contexts, co-edited by Lynn Comella and Mariella Popolla.
Are there Disciplinary Differences in Writing about Pornography?
By Alan McKee, University of Technology Sydney and Roger Ingham, University of Southampton, UK. In 2016, Professors Alan McKee (a humanities researcher) and Roger Ingham (a psychology researcher) submitted to the Australian Research Council a successful grant application for a project entitled ‘Pornography’s effects on audiences: explaining contradictory research data’ (DP170100808). We were approached by Feona Attwood, who knew of the grant and asked if we could provide a piece for this special issue that explored ‘writing about porn across disciplines’. The process of writing the grant application had already provided us with plenty of rich data about differences in disciplinary vocabularies and the ways in which various words implied different objects of study and different relationships to objects of study. Rather than trying to hide these differences we decided to make them the focus of the article. This piece presents three voices – Alan (AM), Roger (RI) and the original grant application (GA) – in trialogue, as a tentative beginning to the exploration of some potential differences between academic disciplines in conceptualising, researching and writing about pornography.
Industry Self-Censorship and the Birth of the ‘Alternative Adult’ Market
By David Church, Northern Arizona University, US. Prosecutions of theatre owners for obscenity increased after the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller v. California decision returned responsibility for obscenity definitions to the judgment of local community standards, meaning that ‘smaller hard-core theatres suffered through a lack of product and a suddenly more discerning hard-core audience.’ [1] One of the major implications of this legal precedent was a deliberate toning down of ostensibly aberrant or ‘taboo’ content in many post-1973 hardcore films. […] In the theatrical pornographic feature, illicit acts seldom appeared to begin with, but even a handful of 35mm genre ‘classics’- such as The Story of Joanna (1975), Femmes de Sade (1976), Barbara Broadcast (1977), Pretty Peaches (1978), Candy Stripers (1978), and 800 Fantasy Lane (1979) - suffered trims of select scenes when later appearing on video.
Book Review – Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema
Review of Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema by David Church. Bloomsbury. 2016. (HB, PB, eBook). 296pp.
Review by Desirae Embree, Texas A&M University, US.
Book Review – Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity
Review of Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity by John Mercer. I. B. Tauris. 2017. Review by Brandon Arroyo, Concordia University, Canada.
Book Review – Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist Philosophy
review by Martin Fradley, University of Brighton, UK.
Publication Announcement: The Spectral Duration of Malayalam Soft-porn: Disappearance, Desire and Haunting
Author: Darshana Mini. Journal: Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 7(2). December. 2016, 127-150.
Susie Bright, Good Vibrations and the Politics of Sexual Representation
by Lynn Comella, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US. Susie Bright was not yet the nationally known author and trailblazer Susie Sexpert when she walked through the doors of Good Vibrations for the first time in 1980. She was 22 years old and lived around the corner from the store at Twentieth and Valencia Streets. Bright remembers that initial visit vividly. Honey Lee Cottrell, who would later become Bright’s lover and collaborator, was working behind the counter. Cottrell, a butch lesbian with prematurely greying hair, was opening envelopes that contained a single quarter – the amount that the store’s founder, Joani Blank, was charging at the time for an itemised list of vibrators that doubled as the company’s mail-order catalogue. Bright watched curiously as Cottrell opened the envelopes and stacked the quarters, one on top of the other, next to the cash register. ‘Why don’t you just put them in the register?’ she finally asked. ‘We don’t know how to record it’, Cottrell replied. ‘It’s not a sale and no one can figure out what it is, so we just pile them up on the side and Joani says she will deal with it later’.
‘Sex Work’ at the BBFC, Part I
by Neil Jackson, University of Lincoln, UK. Has anybody seen a good ‘sex work’ recently? At best, it is a question that is likely to cause mildly embarrassed befuddlement in the casual film enthusiast. At worst, anybody even mildly attuned to sociolinguistic nuances may infer suggestion of voyeuristic interest in the workaday toils of prostitution. Either way, ‘sex work’ is a generic term that has been deployed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to distinguish the titillating, affective charge of wanton hardcore pornography. It is a phrase that has become the board’s common descriptor for hardcore films with an R18 classification (the ‘R’ being an abbreviation of ‘restricted’). This limits sale or projection to premises specially licensed to handle such material, and separates it from non-pornographic, dramatic or documentary feature film formats that present sexually explicit themes and images for an adult audience at the 18 certificate level. Essentially, if the BBFC determines that a film is pornographic in nature and intent (that is, designed primarily to sexually arouse the spectator), it is dealt with as a ‘sex work’.
